Taxonomic history Malusflorentina was initially described in 1806 as a species of
hawthorn,
Crataegus florentina, by the
Florentine botanist (17541807), based on a
specimen collected on Monte Cuccioli near
Florence, Italy. In total, the species has been classified in as many as eight different genera, while some authors also treated it as a
subspecies of the closely related Lebanese wild apple (
M.trilobata). Additionally, the species was at times considered to have
originated from an ancient hybridisation between the wild service tree (
Torminalis glaberrima, formerly
Sorbus torminalis) and the European wild apple (
M.sylvestris), a view that was still widely accepted in the early 2000s. Prominently, the Polish
dendrologist held this view, and in 1970 classified the species in the
nothogenus , as . While he emphasised the species'
lobed leaves, this characteristic is also present in some North American and East Asian
Malus species, prompting Sutton and Dunn (2021) to remark: "It is tempting to speculate that this suggestion would never have been made if the tree were native to
Sichuan rather than southern Europe." Accordingly, as of October 2025,
Plants of the World Online includes the species in
Malus. This discordance between nuclear and plastid phylogenies, the authors proposed, could be due to several factors during the speciation process:
incomplete lineage sorting, that is, the inheritance of an incomplete set of
alleles from the
most recent common ancestor;
allopolyploidy, that is, the inheritance of more than two copies of alleles; or
hybridisation, the crossing of species. All of these were important mechanisms underlying the evolution of the
Maleae, the apple
tribe, rendering the reconstruction of its evolutionary history difficult. The authors proposed hybridisation as the most likely scenario, whereby the ancestor of Clade II hybridised with the ancestor of
Pourthiaea, so that all its descendants, including
M.florentina, inherited
Pourthiaea's
chloroplast DNA through a process known as
chloroplast capture. On the other hand, in a 2017 study by Savelyeva and colleagues, these relationships were not supported, and two
M.florentina samples did not even cluster together in one clade. In a further 2024 study by Sun and colleagues, the authors argued for a resurection of the genus
Eriolobus to contain both
M. trilobata and
M. florentina. This was based on a phylogenetic analysis of
mitochondrial DNA, which yielded a similar
phylogenetic tree to studies based on plastid DNA. However, the authors of the study incorrectly identified
M. florentina as a North American species. According to Liu and colleagues (2022),
Malus originated in North America and East Asia, most likely in the middle
Eocene, between 41.2 and 44.39 million years ago.
Malus antiqua, a fossil species with lobed leaves from the
Pliocene (5.33–2.58 Mya) of Europe, recovered in
Romania, is thought to be ancestral to
M.florentina or
M.trilobata. leaf shape, which resembles that of a hawthorn (
Crataegus). ==Description==